Moms Spending More Time Prepping Kids for Elite Colleges

A new study suggests college-educated mothers in the United States
are becoming preoccupied with preparing children for elite college
admissions.

According to University of California-San Diego economists Garey and
Valerie Ramey, women have dramatically increased the time they spend
taking their children to organized activities.

According to some counts, these women trade in nine hours of their
own leisure time every week in an effort to prep their children to
secure a seat at a top university.

The study has an autobiographical inspiration. When the Rameys moved
to San Diego’s University City neighborhood, they found children’s
schedules were packed with sports, arts and other classes. Over time,
the Rameys, especially Valerie, found themselves caught up in the
competition.

“I was shocked to find moms with graduate degrees who had quit their
jobs because they needed more time to drive their children to
activities,” Valerie Ramey said.

At first, they thought this was just a local fad. But after
reviewing data from 12 U.S. surveys describing how people spend their
time, from 1965 to 2007, they realized they were onto a national trend.

The researchers found that, after three decades of decline, the
amount of time dedicated to child care went up dramatically in the past
20 years, even while the number of children per household decreased.

The rise began in the mid-1990s. It was twice as great for
college-educated parents and was most pronounced among mothers. On
average, the amount of time college-educated women spent on child care
went up from 13 to 22 hours per week since the mid-1990s.

By contrast, the amount went up from 11 to 16 hours for women
without a college education. Meanwhile, child care went up from four to
10 hours for college-educated fathers, and from four to eight hours for
fathers without a college education.

Most of the increases came from time spent with older, school-age
children – and especially from time spent on taking the kids from one
activity to the next.

The researchers first analyzed the data to see if any of the
conventional explanations could account for the shift. But it wasn’t
that their sample had changed over time. It wasn’t due to an increase
in income, or an increase in crime rates, which would cause parents to
spend more time supervising their children.

It wasn’t that parents enjoyed spending more time on child care. In
fact, mothers said in surveys that child care was less enjoyable than
cooking and housework. It wasn’t that parents enjoyed more flexibility
in their work schedules, either.

The increase happened just as college admissions became more and
more competitive. The number of high school graduates eligible to go to
college has gone up dramatically in the past two decades, but college
slots haven’t, the Rameys noted.

The increase also happened around the same time when college
graduates started making a lot more money than everyone else. So the
Rameys came to a novel conclusion:

Parents were filling their children’s schedules with activities in
the hopes that it would get them into a good college and help them
secure a lucrative job later on.

To test their hypothesis, the researchers compared child care data
for the United States and Canada, where many of the same social fads
take hold but where college admissions are also a lot less competitive.
The Rameys found that the amount of time parents spent on child care in
that country remained flat during the past two decades.

“Suddenly everything came together,” Valerie Ramey said. “None of
the pieces of evidence we have is bulletproof, but we have a lot of
pieces that all point in the same direction.”

“If investing in your kids like this also makes them better citizens
or has other benefits for society, then this increase in time spent on
child care might be a good thing,” Ramey said.

“But it could also be that these private decisions are not socially optimal.”

If further study suggests that this is indeed “wasteful
overinvestment,” the authors write, perhaps it could be mitigated by
expanding the number of slots or by modifying college acceptance rules
to place greater emphasis on criteria that cannot be directly
influenced by parents.

Meanwhile, it’s unclear how long parents will have to compete in the
rug rat race. Demographics dictate that the number of high school
graduates eligible for college will drop once children of the baby
boomers graduate.

Also, a number of groups and popular authors have begun a rebelling against overly structured parenting, Valerie Ramey said, citing the “free range children” movement and the book “The Idle Parent” by Tom Hodgkinson.

“I think we’re already seeing a backlash,” she said.

The Rameys dub the phenomenon “the rug rat race” and describe it in
a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper of the same name.